When I want to get in touch with my inner child, I watch animation movies. And I just watched again ‘Inside out’. I love Pixar and I absolutely approve (as if anyone needed my approval:) of this movie they made in 2015. I can relate it to a TCK experience or more broadly an expat story.

Here’s the official trailer:

To keep it short… Riley is happy 11 year old, characterised by 5 sets of emotions: Joy, Fear, Anger, Disgust and Sadness. Her core memories have created ‘islands’ that make up her personality: family, friends, hockey, honesty and goofiness.

Most of her memories are happy and one sided: only happy or only disgust, for example. Everything changes for her when due to her dad’s job, she has to leave her life behind and move into a new city, new school, new house…

Due to an unexpected set of events, as Riley starts to feel more sad, lonely or angry, and the emotions Joy and Sadness end up lost in the long term memory of Riley, far away from ‘headquarters’ where they see what Riley is doing and try to respond appropriately (mostly with Joy).

As Riley struggles in the new city, her islands start dismembering one by one… she loses goofiness when she is unable to answer her dad’s silly jokes, she loses friendship when she becomes jealous her childhood friend has a new friend, she loses hokey when in the trails in the new team she gets angry and throws her equipment… the only island barely standing is family. But her emotions (Anger, Fear, Disgust) try to help her, by making her happy, as she once was in Minnesota – and the Riley decides ‘pushed’ by them, to run away from home and go back to her previous city.

What I retain from this movie is that Joy was almost obsessively trying to keep all of Riley’s emotions as happy, and she tries as best as possible to keep sadness away from touching any memories (as she turns them into ‘blue’/sadness) and doesn’t understand sadness’s role in Riley’s life. However, by looking at one memory, she realises that it’s thanks to sadness that Riley’s parents came to the rescue.  Sadness’s role is essential and also is important in letting Riley expressing what she truly feels at that moment.

Although Riley gets on a bus, Sadness and Joy manage to come back to headquarters and ‘undo’ what the other emotions have started. Riley gets off the bus and goes home. And for the first time, she tells her parents how she actually feels. That she knows they want her to be happy but that she misses Minnesota and her life from before.

The family island is stronger then ever, as her parents show compassion and understanding and tell her they miss their old life too. New memories crated from this point onwards, are a mix of happiness and disgust or maybe fear… they are complex and how life truly is. And that is the main message… we are complex beings and although we would like to be or force ourselves to always ‘be happy’ that is not truly healthy or helpful.

I relate to this last thought very well, as I find that by forcing myself at times to keep going and ‘putting on brave face’ I have numbed myself down and built up a lot of anger and sadness. And at some point, all that was too much.

I realise now, a healthy way of living is letting myself experience the spectrum of emotions and to acknowledge and let them be … and let them go. I try, to the best of my ability to not accumulate anything… except gratitude.

Gratitude is the one emotion that more is expressed, the more we somehow feel grateful for.